A Map of Neandertal Genes in Present Day Humans

Anatomically modern humans overlapped in time and space with Neandertals, and genetic data has revealed that hybridization occurred. We have developed methods to identify Neandertal sequences that persist in the DNA of modern individuals, and applied it to whole-genome sequences from over 1,500 geographically diverse individuals. We leverage the catalog of surviving Neandertal sequences to show that admixture occurred multiple times in different non-African populations, characterize genomic regions that are significantly depleted of archaic sequence, and identify signatures of adaptive introgression. These data provide new insights in hominin evolutionary history and genomic regions that may harbor substrates of uniquely modern human phenotypes.